The invention relates to transportation means employed by the mining industry, and more particularly it relates to a thrower of transported materials.
The invention can be utilized to utmost effectiveness in quarries where ores of ferrous and non-ferrous metals are mined, to dislodge the mass of rock from the site of the immediate excavation to either the side of the quarry, or to areas wherefrom this mass can be transported by other means of transportation.
The invention can be likewise broadly used in the construction industry, e.g. at excavation of construction materials which can be thrown from the place of excavation to the loading area, at construction of embankments leading to bridges over rivers and marshes, at damming rivers, at constructing embankments for railways and highways, at filling-up at mining. The invention can be also used for load handling, e.g. for reloading of grain, for loading construction materials, such as clay, road metal, etc. into sea and river ships, for averaging the composition of mixtures at iron ore nodulizing factories, etc.
Nowadays transportation by conveyors is considered an advanced technique ever wider used by the mining industry. However, the technique is not free from some disadvantages. The complicated and costly maintenance and repairs of conveyer belts of considerable lengths, the sticking of the material to the belts, the necessity of moving the masses of the belt and its support rollers jointly with the load affect the efficiency of the technique. Furthermore, belt conveyers have great amounts of metal in their structures and necessitate the use of complicated and metal-consuming dump formers or stokers. Their open-air operation involves weather-induced complications. All the abovesaid adds up to the relatively high energy consumption and impaired performance, to say nothing of the problem of transporting rock masses by belt conveyors being complicated still further if the path of the transportation is to be an inclined one, particularly, a steep one.
The hydraulic and pneumatic transportation techniques, also employed nowadays, have disadvantages arising from the necessity of mixing a load to be transported with water or air, the mass of the water or air being substantially greater than the mass of the load. The techniques require specifically provided pipelines offering additional resistance to the progress of the load; other apparatus and plant are also required to perform the transportation.
The complexity of the process itself and of the plant performing it, putting as it does positive limitations as to the use of the last-mentioned techniques, explains the very narrow field of uses of the hydraulic and pneumatic transportation in the total scope of load-handling in the mining industry.
One should also mention for comparison sake the use of excavators for dislodging rock masses over relatively short distances. When a load is transported by the slewing of an excavator, it has added thereto the significant mass of the slewing parts of the excavator, the value of the mass of an excavator per unit of the bucket capacity increasing with the increasing capacity of the excavator itself; this obviously affects the efficiency of the machine and brings up the transportation costs.
The above short discourse into the means of transportation of rock mass enables one to draw a conclusion that in the field of excavation of rock mass one should look for the reduction of energy consumption and costs in three major directions, viz. reducing the mass of the container parts of the transportation means to a positive minimum and, in an ideal case, eliminating it altogether; reducing the length of the path of conveying the rock mass from an excavation area in the quarry, striving toward having this path extending along a straight line from the excavation area toward the quarry side; conveying the rock mass with the minimum resistance offered to its progress.
Now, considering the abovestated trends of reducing the energy and operational costs as the requirements put before the newly constructed transportation means, one can formulate the ideal case, as follows:
the load is transported free of containers enclosing or supporting it: PA1 the load is transported via the shortest route from the excavation area to the side of the quarry, i.e. along a straight line; PA1 the load is transported with the minimum resistance to its progress, i.e. through air, with the resistance of the bearings and support members of the transportation means positively eliminated.
The transportation of loads with the above requirements met can be effected by throwing, i.e. by free flight of a load having an initial velocity.
The hitherto known throwing arrengements used for accelerating and throwing gaseous, liquid and solid bodies are not usable in the presently described case for a number of reasons of which the main one is that the known throwers, e.g. employed for military purposes, have both a low efficiency factor and low throughput. The known centrifugal throwers of the rotary pump type, on the other hand, would not provide for aimed or directional throwing.
Thus, the centrifugal thrower (cf., the U.S. Pat. No. 3,613,655; Cl. 124-6) is intended for throwing projectiles at a high speed and comprises a rotatable rotor with a peripheral guideway. The thrower incorporates an annular trough along which a projectile is moved at a high acceleration from an input area either at or adjacent to the center of the rotor to the outlet area of the peripheral guideway. The trough is made up of an external concave section and an internal convex section, with the external surface of the concave section facing in the direction of the rotation of the rotor.
Even if one presumes that the abovedescribed thrower is capable of directed or aimed throwing of projectiles, it is, nonetheless, not fit for throwing rock masses.
Firstly, the authors of the abovedescribed structure themselves presume that the thrower would accelerate a projectile of a specified geometric shape and dimensions corresponding to the annular trough of the rotor. Secondly, the projectile moves along the trough by sliding friction forces. When one considers that the rock mass may have its particle composition varying within a wide range, it becomes understandable that the specifically dimensioned and gauged trough does not fit the picture, whereas it is obviously impractical to dimension or gauge the rock mass to fit the channel of a given shape. Furthermore, if one considers that the rock mass is abrasive to a degree that its forwarding in the rotor by the sliding friction forces would wear out the rotor within a very short period, it is likewise obvious that the abovedescribed thrower is not operable for the practical purposes of throwing the rock mass.
It is an object of the present invention to increase the efficiency of the transportation of a material.
It is another object of the present invention to reduce the amount of metal in the means used for the transportation of a material.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide a thrower capable of directed or aimed throwing of a bulk material and piece loads.
These and other objects of the present invention are attained in a thrower of transported materials, comprising a rotatable rotor with means for receiving and unloading the material, wherein, in accordance with the present invention, each receiving and unloading means includes a container pivotally connected with the rotor through at least one intermediate connecting rod, the axis of the rotation of the rotor and the axes of rotation of the connecting rod being parallel, the spacing between the axes of rotation of the pivots of the connecting rod equalling one half of the spacing between the axis of the rotation of the rotor and the axis of rotation of the pivot of the connecting rod the thrower further is provided with a drive for rotating the said rotor and the said connecting rod in the same direction at the same angular speed, and rotating said container at an angular speed which is twice the angular speed of the rotation of the rotor.